OUR VIEW: Sunshine Week is about your right to know

Saturday

Mar 10, 2018 at 6:57 PMMar 20, 2018 at 10:14 AM

American democracy, at its core, has a purity of purpose endowed by its originators. Going back to our very Declaration of Independence, in which the founders threw over the divine right of kings, there is embedded in this national birth certificate the core of our revolutionary concept that governments derived “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” It’s what made us, as President Abraham Lincoln would so eloquently sum up, a “Government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

That means you. Our democracy exists because of you, through you, and for you. Perhaps not perfect, but from the beginning of our constitutional system of governance it carried the aspirational message of seeking a more perfect union, one that derives its “just powers” from you. But our “consent” is only as informed to the degree that the functions of our democracy are open, as in accessible and transparent, to all of us.

That, in a nutshell, is at the heart of Sunshine Week, when we assess the degree of openness of our government’s policymaking and operations through what are known as its “sunshine laws.” It’s important to note, however, that this isn’t only about the media’s ability to keep you informed, but how open the workings of government are for you directly as individuals.

Our rights of access as “the press,” while honed through centuries of experience, are no greater than your rights to the same information. And while our function as an institution is to observe and report and analyze, your individual and collective rights are far greater — to act, to influence, to effect change, to democratically select who will govern us.

In the absence of government openness and your ability to participate in and benefit from knowledgeable debate, trust in government is a risky business, especially in an era in which accusations of “fake news” — both real and imagined — pervade our national discussion. We do get the government we collectively deserve, which is why your ability to know and to understand the functioning of your government and your leaders at all levels — local, state, and national — is so crucial to our democracy. It’s why the very First Amendment to the Constitution enshrines not only the freedom of religion and of speech to all, but of the press, and to your right to peacefully assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. There are no exceptions or qualifications among those words.

Which is why we’re devoting our opinion pages to a guide to your democracy.

We’ve assembled contact information for your elected leadership at all levels of government, tools you can use in engaging your government and leaders, with perspectives on how to detect the rising tide of fake news, ways for approaching and communicating with your elected leaders and the importance and state of our commonwealth’s openness to you. What you see on these opinion pages is part of a collaborative effort by our sister paper the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, both in print and online.

Last year’s revision of the state’s public records access law — the first significant update in nearly 45 years — at least addressed what was part of our stigma in having one of the worst public records laws in America. And that was just what was on the books. The implementation of even those laws, we had found, was spotty at best. Requests for information that you have the right to access was routinely ignored or pushed aside, or even greeted with hostility, and where access to records could come with outrageous fees for information that in other states was free or available for a nominal fee. You could go to court and prove that your government illegally withheld public records from you, but you were prohibited from collecting legal fees, something that 47 other states allowed — and something that last year’s update fortunately now allows.

But much work remains.

The secretary of state’s “A Guide to the Massachusetts Public Records Law” is 40 pages long, not counting an extensive appendix. Remarkably, 19 of those 40 pages are filled with the 21 broad categories of exceptions to the public records law. Even worse, just one of those 21 broad categories includes — in the appendix — 62 statutory exemptions from the law. It’s mind-boggling. We are the only state in the union in which all three branches of government — the governor, the legislature, and the judiciary — each claim to be exempt from the open records law. That’s right, the legislature that approved last year’s reforms, the governor who signed them into law and the judiciary whose members are the ultimate enforcers are all in effect saying, “Do what I tell you, and I’ll do what I want in secret.”

It’s more important than ever that you have access to the “facts” of how your government makes its decisions and how it functions. The point of Sunshine Week is to monitor, inform and hopefully spur action to assure your rights — as the governed — to those facts.